MSc in Medical Statistics, PhD from Oxford. Background in Pharmaceutical R&D. Contributor to popular magazines and trade magazines including Scrip Magazine, New Scientist and the Economist. Formerly Editor of the journal Pharmaceutical Statistics.

The LinkedIn stock market flotation provides further evidence in support of Amara's Law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Roy Amara (1925-2007) True or False? Discuss. The market valuation pre-IPO? $25 Current share price? $88 More On Technology: Clarke's First Law "When a...scientist states that... Read More

In Why Do Scientists Usually Get The Results They Expect? we looked at the very human tendency to look for data that support our current beliefs and the common failure to test those beliefs - the phenomenon known as confirmation bias . But it gets worse. For there is the Law of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy or "Scientist's Conceit" . The Law of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy states that... Read More

There are several reasons but in this piece I'm going to focus on confirmation bias - or myside bias . This is a tendency for people to favour information that confirms their preconceptions or beliefs regardless of whether the information is true. I used to run a short workshop for scientists in which I would tell them I had a rule in my head. Their job was to find out what that rule was by... Read More

We will be undertaking website infrastructure upgrades and operating system updates throughout the Aug 1 and 2 weekend that may cause occasional downtime for BestThinking.com. Be ye not concerned, we'll be back online better than ever ASAP.